Vice President JD Vance on Thursday said he was insulted by a vote in the Israeli Knesset over the annexation of the West Bank, adding his name to the list of senior White House officials airing their grievances with Israel as they look to build on a fragile ceasefire with Hamas.
“The policy of the Trump administration is that the West Bank will not be annexed by Israel. That will continue to be our policy,” Vance said at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport. “And if people want to take symbolic votes, they can do that. But we certainly weren’t happy about it.”
Vance, who spent two days meeting with officials in Israel this week, told reporters that President Donald Trump would not allow Israel to take over the West Bank.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office told POLITICO in a statement that the Knesset vote was “a deliberate political provocation by the opposition to sow discord” and that it did not have the support of the ruling Likud party.
“The Likud party and the religious parties (the principal coalition members) did not vote for these bills, except for one disgruntled Likud member who was recently fired from the chairmanship of a Knesset committee,” Netanyahu’s office said. “Without Likud support these bills are unlikely to go anywhere.”
White House officials celebrated their efforts to reach a ceasefire in Gaza early this month, one of the signature foreign policy achievements of Trump’s second term. Trump was widely lauded in a subsequent visit to the Middle East, and Hamas returned 20 living hostages to Israel.
But already, both sides are testing the new boundaries. Israel struck several targets inside Gaza on Sunday, after reporting Hamas had shot at Israeli soldiers inside the enclave. Then on Wednesday, the Israeli parliament preliminarily approved a bill that would empower Israel to impose its authority on the West Bank.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio also panned the Knesset vote, telling reporters Wednesday that “we think it’s potentially even threatening to the peace deal.”
“They’re a Democracy, they’re gonna have their votes, people are going to take these positions, but at this time it’s something that we think might be counterproductive,” he said.
Trump has also been critical of Netanyahu, telling Time magazine in an Oct. 15 interview that the prime minister had to stop his incursion into Gaza “because the world was going to stop him.”
Even then, the president ruled out the prospect of Israel annexing the West Bank.
“It won’t happen,” he said. “It won’t happen. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. And you can’t do that now. We’ve had great Arab support. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. It will not happen. Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened.”
Vance told reporters he inquired about the vote during his visit and was told it was purely symbolic. Still, he voiced his disapproval.
“If it was a political stunt, it was a very stupid political stunt, and I personally take some insult to it,” he said.
On Sunday, Jared Kushner, one of Trump’s top Middle East negotiators, panned Israel’s early September bombing of Doha but said he and special envoy Steve Witkoff were able to use it to their advantage in crafting the Middle East peace agreement.
“After the missile strike — in Qatar from Israel — Steve and I basically were, were very upset about that,” he said on CBS’ “60 Minutes.” “We thought that that really was not a smart strategic move, and it violated a lot of the trust that we felt — like we deserved from the Israeli side.”
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